2018 in Digital

The heatwave of the summer of 2018 feels like a lifetime ago now doesn’t it? As we all say on an annual basis, the year has absolutely flown by.

At Revolve we’re firm believers that you can’t move forward without looking back. The end of the year is a time to reflect on where you’ve come from and where you’re going, and we think that assessing life and work in this way is invaluable in terms of personal development and growth.

Plans may be afoot for 2019, but there are lots of lessons to be learned from the year that was. Instead of our usual look at The Week in Digital, we thought we’d take a trip down recent memory lane and assess the past 12 months through the lens of brands, content and people.

We’ll be back with our next edition of The Week in Digital after Christmas. For now, this is 2018 in Digital.

HEADLINES

Spotify

Spotify has had quite a year. The Swedish streaming service went public in the United States and sits firmly as a key player in the music industry.

The company is also positioning itself to start finding other revenue streams, either through selling data back to artists, podcasts, live events or more advertising. Thanks to Spotify’s global end of year ad campaigns, the latter has proved especially successful both this year and in the past few years.

As part of its 2018 Wrapped activation, Spotify gave brands and marketers a recap of their year on the platform. The ad world’s top listening moments and campaigns make for interesting and unique reading.

Twitter

Twitter’s annual round-up of the top tweets and moments on the platform is essential reading to get the jist of what happened in a given year.

Instagram

The fastest growing social network (by a considerable margin) used its year in review to highlight some trends from 2018 and share all the different ways its global community came to the platform to express themselves and get closer to the people – and things – they love.

Facebook

What a year for Facebook eh? While most companies aspire to avoid scandal, publications like WIRED Magazine are able to create round-ups of the biggest Facebook scandals in 2018alone.

Mark Zuckerberg and co. may be happy to see the back of 2018, but the company still saw the value in an annual review of the moments that mattered on the platform.

Reddit

While it’s perhaps not as popular in Ireland as some of the aforementioned platforms, Reddit consistently produces fascinating insights from its thousands of communities, endless conversation and human connection.

Prepare to spend far too much time diving into Reddit’s year in review.